The term "crowdsourcing" is a portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing," first coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing" Wikipedia
Jeff defined crowdsourcing as the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.
Similar to cloud computing, where applications utilize free resources from processors and memory from different machines, crowdsourcing taps into the free brain cycles of a dispersed crowd, to perform generally complex and lengthy tasks at a low cost and in a relatively short period of time.
The purpose of this post is to propose the use of crowdsourcing as a tool to alleviate the pressure of unemployment around the world. But before going into that, I would like to share two examples of crowdsourcing platforms.
The first example of a crowdsourcing platform is Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk, named after a machine built in the late 1760s by a Hungarian nobleman named Wolfgang von Kempelen and was capable of beating a human at chess. The machine, called the Turk, consisted of a small wooden cabinet, a chessboard, and the torso of a turbaned mannequin. It toured Europe and was able to beat luminaries but it was just a hoax. In fact, it was powered by human intelligence, hiding a flesh-and-blood chess master. Amazon.com copied the name for its web-based marketplace that helps companies find people to perform tasks computers are generally lousy at – identifying items in a pictures, searching for contact information on the web, reviewing a portal's viewers comments, writing short product descriptions, transcribing audio files, short paragraphs translations, etc. Amazon calls the tasks HITs (human intelligence tasks); they’re designed to require very little time, and consequently they offer very little compensation – most from a few cents to a few dollars.
The second example is around using the innovation of the crowd to solve real world challenges of companies, governments, research institutions or individuals. Innocentive's proven Challenge Driven Innovation methodology and tools connect solution Seekers – corporations, governments, and nonprofits – to creative and passionate problem Solvers to find solutions to their most pressing challenges. Leading commercial, public sector, and nonprofit organizations such as Eli Lilly, Life Technologies, NASA, nature.com, Popular Science, Procter & Gamble, Roche, Rockefeller Foundation, and The Economist partner with InnoCentive to help them solve their most pressing problems and challenges. They claim having more than 250,000 "solvers" who are individuals in 200 countries. This community has generated so far around $7 million with awards ranging between $5,000 and $1 million. Read more here to check how this innovation crowdsourcing platform helped solve challenges such as oil spill recovery, solutions for deadly deceases, lighting african villages and many more.
InnoCentive can be considered a crowd market for specialized talents, whereas Mechanical Turk is crowdsourcing for the masses, enabling any literate individual to find something to do and work on to generate income. There are many more examples of different models and platforms around crowdsourcing which you can read about in the references section at the end of this post.
Going back to the our main question, I’d like to position crowdsouring as an agent in alleviating the effect of unemployment in our societies. Most of the efforts from governments and non governmental organizations are around financing small and medium businesses which in turn create employment opportunities. But financing alone is not enough, especially in the economical crises that we're witnessing. Crowdsourcing would have faster impact and wider reach. In order to illustrate the impact of crowdsourcing , checkout how Samasource is giving dignified, digital work to marginalized people around the world.
The call is for governments and NGOs to replicate Samasource's model and customize it to support the communities they're looking after.
To make this work, we need to define the stakeholders, infrastructure and operation model.
The stakeholders would be:
From an infrastructure and operation perspective, we need to tackle the following:
I'll post details about these requirements in a future post. Meanwhile, I would appreciate readers views and content contributions.
Further readings on crowdsourcing:
1- The Rise of Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe
2- Check the crowdsourcing landscape slide from Building Success in a Connected World by Ross Dawson
3- Crowdsourcing papers on Crowdconf.com
4- Crowdsourcing 101
To make this work, we need to define the stakeholders, infrastructure and operation model.
The stakeholders would be:
- The Community: Properly selected group of educated and unemployed individuals in the target societies.
- The Operator: a company or institution that would be in charge of running the operation, including governance, technical support, payment processing, etc.
- The Seekers: A group of organizations from government agencies or private sector willing to post their business requirements on the community portal to be picked up and executed by its members.
- The Sponsor(s): One or more organizations who would sponsor this project, fund it to get it up and running, and encourage both communities and seekers to be actively engaged in making it a success.
From an infrastructure and operation perspective, we need to tackle the following:
- Build a crowdsourcing technology platform customized to the stakeholders needs
- Define a business model enabling a sustainable operation, easy and simple interaction and efficient governance
I'll post details about these requirements in a future post. Meanwhile, I would appreciate readers views and content contributions.
Further readings on crowdsourcing:
1- The Rise of Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe
2- Check the crowdsourcing landscape slide from Building Success in a Connected World by Ross Dawson
3- Crowdsourcing papers on Crowdconf.com
4- Crowdsourcing 101
